Resolution 15 of 2025 took effect on 1 November, the Manpower Authority warned in April that wage auditing would be intensified, and 12,888 companies were registered in five months. Warah, a Kuwait City platform priced from a ten-employee minimum, is built against the records now being demanded.
On 1 November 2025, Ministerial Resolution No. 15 of 2025 came into force. Published in Kuwait Al-Youm on 14 September, it obliges every private-sector employer to submit daily working hours, rest periods, weekends and official holidays into the Public Authority for Manpower’s electronic system, and to update those entries promptly when they change. PAM treats the electronic records as the official reference on the employer’s file and relies on them during workplace inspections. Non-compliance can bring partial or complete suspension of that file.
The resolution changed none of the underlying rights in Law No. 6 of 2010. It changed which copy of the record is authoritative and where that copy is held. An employer’s obligation is no longer to keep records, but to keep records that reconcile continuously with a government database.
Warah, the Kuwait City platform chaired by Mohammed Alaiban with Abdullah Alkhuzam as vice chairman and chief executive, is built against that requirement directly. Its attendance module runs check-in and check-out with geolocation or IP restriction and produces automated weekly and monthly timesheets with overtime calculated to the Kuwaiti labour law. Leave balances update against Kuwaiti public holidays, and audit logs track user actions. Pricing starts at a ten-employee minimum, and more than 60 client logos appear on its site, concentrated in the segment now carrying the most exposure: GHK Lawyers, Orlando Clinic, 48 East Coffee Roasters, Logba General Trading, Challenge Health Club.
Automatic Suspension Reactivated for Wage Delays
Wages have moved the same way. PAM reactivated automatic suspension of company files for employers who fail to transfer the salaries of workers registered on those files, and in July 2025 suspended a large group of files belonging to non-compliant companies on the directives of the First Deputy Prime Minister and Interior Minister. Since October 2025, an employer wanting to log a salary shortfall must enter the reason worker by worker through the wage-monitoring system on the Ashal companies portal, attaching a clean supporting document endorsed by the worker’s signature or fingerprint. In April 2026 the Authority told employers that auditing of on-time monthly wage transfers through approved channels would be intensified, and named automatic file suspension as the consequence. Warah’s payroll module generates wage protection files formatted for NBK, KFH and Boubyan among others, alongside indemnity and final settlement.
The cost of a suspended file is easy to underestimate. When PAM published a new package of work-permit services on Ashal in April, the same condition appeared under each of them: no suspension on the file, the licence or the worker. The Public Authority for Civil Information counted a workforce of roughly 3.3 million at the end of June 2026, about 2.8 million of them expatriates, with Indians alone making up 30.7 percent of private-sector employees. A company that cannot move a permit cannot staff itself. The binding constraint is not the fine but the block on permit movement.
12,888 Companies Registered in Five Months
The number of businesses entering this regime is rising. Ministry of Commerce and Industry data show 12,888 companies established in the first five months of 2026, against 23,215 licences issued. Almost all of them are small. Markaz has placed roughly 90 percent of Kuwaiti businesses in the SME bracket, and the World Bank has measured that bracket at about 3 percent of GDP while employing close to a quarter of the workforce. These are the firms least likely to hold a system capable of producing a defensible attendance log or a clean wage file on demand, and they are the firms Warah’s entry tier is priced for.
Every GCC labour regulator is moving in the same direction, from the UAE’s MOHRE wage regime to Saudi Arabia’s Nitaqat and GOSI reporting and Qatar’s 2024 nationalisation law. Kuwait’s requirements differ in the specifics: PAM and Ashal, wage protection routed through local banks, indemnity under Law No. 6 of 2010, leave accrual against the Kuwaiti holiday calendar.
The limit is worth stating. Software does not create compliance, and a correctly formatted wage file from a company that has not funded payroll is a well-documented violation. Kuwait’s requirements also arrive by ministerial resolution with little public notice, which makes any claim to be built in accordance with the labour law a maintenance commitment rather than a fixed property. The measure of a platform here is the speed of its updates after each new resolution.
That measure will keep being applied. The IMF’s 2025 Article IV consultation, concluded in February, urged Kuwait to unify its labour market and extend the 15 percent corporate income tax to all domestic companies. Both reforms end at the same requirement: an employer proving from its records what it paid and to whom.
